Performances + Events
From left: James Cornelison, Rachael Price, Bridget Kearney, Mike Calabrese, and Akie Bermiss. Photo courtesy of public emily artist management
The members of Lake Street Dive, a band formed at New England Conservatory in 2004, recently gathered in Vermont for a writing retreat. Drummer Mike Calabrese ’07, bassist Bridget Kearney ’08 NEC/Tufts, and vocalist Rachael Price ’07 were joined by the group’s guitarist, James Cornelison, who replaced founding member Mike Olson ’05 in 2021, to compose music for a forthcoming album.
The band’s songwriting process begins with an idea that’s passed around among the band members and develops with the input of each musician — disparate musical elements combining, Kearney said, to make something new without “emulating any kind of genre or style.” Each tune is an amalgam of individual expressions.
Twenty years on from NEC, the members of Lake Street Dive, whose 2024 release Good Together was nominated for a Grammy Award in the “Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album” category, can trace the nourishment of that individuality to the work they did as students in the Conservatory’s Jazz Studies Department, where Kearney said “there’s this emphasis on development of personal style,” and where “it’s important for you to think carefully about what kind of music you want to make, in addition to learning from the masters.”
“I found that NEC was very good at emphasizing the fundamental building blocks of music and not being too rigid with genre,” she said.
Over the course of its 21-year history, Lake Street Dive, which keyboardist Akie Bermiss joined in 2017, has grown closer as a band. The relationships that began and were nurtured at NEC have evolved, as has the band’s approach to songwriting.
“It’s basically just gotten slowly and slowly more and more collaborative,” Price said, adding that while she and her fellow band members have always collaborated, that process has deepened with the recording of each album.
“First, we started writing songs together and it was like we sort of split off into pairs. One person would be like, ‘Oh, would you mind adding something to this song?’ But now, it’s like we’re going to lose track, this time, of who put something on a song, which is cool,” Price continued, adding, “We’re also discussing the meanings of the songs more.
“That’s a really cool collaborative process,” she said, ”to all decide what we want to say in a song. But it’s also extremely personal, and it’s tricky, because the songs do tend to start with a little seed of your own sort of experience, or your feeling, and then it grows from there.” That growth is nurtured by respect.
“After 20 years, we just have, I’d say, a pretty incredible amount of trust, now, with each other’s thoughts and ideas,” Price said.
Asked in the days leading up to NEC’s 154th Commencement what they might say to a graduating or incoming student, the members of Lake Street Dive focused on the humanity in music.
Calabrese said, “When people are like, ‘Oh, my son or daughter is getting into music and do you have any advice for them?’ Bridget says, a lot of the time, ‘Find your people.’
“Everybody in this band,” Calabrese said, “who they are is what you get. People say there’s compromise in relationships, and I’m like, ‘Well, in the really good ones, the compromises actually don’t feel like compromises.”
Kearney pointed to the art form’s power.
“There’s plenty of valid reasons to be concerned about the state of the music industry and music technology and what that’s going to do, and there’s also plenty of valid reasons to be anxious about the state of the world right now,” she said. “But, the constants are, music has always been central to human life.
“The most both healing and galvanizing force in art is song and people being healed by it and being brought together by it and being inspired by it,” Kearney said.
